Maccann, MacCann or McCann?

By Bob Gaskins, June, 2001

(The following is excerpted from an e-mail response to a question on the ICA list to the question of the spelling "McCann" or "MacCann")

Dear [deleted],

Your email says that you've been around the concertina world for
nearly 30 years, and during all that time you've heard about the "McCann"
duet system, always so spelled, but now, all of a sudden, there is a rash of
correspondence about the "MacCann" system. You ask what's going on, and
whether some academic ("almost certainly American?") has done a lot of
detailed research, with the result being that the conventional wisdom
has been overturned.
I may well be a source of some of the "MacCann" references you've
been seeing, and (as you well know) I'm certainly American, but the
research wasn't all that detailed. I'll tell you how I happened to
find out about this mix-up.

I'm pretty new around these parts--I got interested in concertinas
about two years ago. When I could find very little on the internet
(back then), I was forced to look at paper sources.

First, I went over to the British Library and looked up the 1884
Maccann patent in the Science Hall; the original volume shows Patent
No. 4752 issued to "John Hill Maccann". I then read all the annual
renewals in the Official Journal of the Patent Office (and successor
titles), just to be sure that they had happened; the renewal was
printed with the spelling "Maccann" in the volume for each year up to
1898.

Then I went across the way to the Rare Books and Music Hall,
searched its catalogue, and looked up a microfilm of John Hill
Maccann's "Concertinist's Guide" (the original had been destroyed in
World War II) and printed myself a copy. The Concertinist's Guide
(1888) contains a photograph of Professor Maccann, extracts of reviews
of his concerts, adverts for concertinas, adverts for lessons with
Maccann at his London studio, addresses of concertina dealers
(including the Maccann family business in Plymouth), plus a few very
general remarks on how to hold the instrument and play it. This
document uses the spelling "Maccann" uniformly.

Following my day at the British Library in late 1999, during the
year 2000 I spent a few days at the Horniman Museum library going
through all the boxes of Neil Wayne's archives (still not sorted or
catalogued at that time); they included a copy of Maccann's 1885 tutor
for his new duet, with the name spelled "Maccann" in big letters on
the cover. (There's also a copy at the British Library which I later
checked--it is the same.)

So the old documents invariably used the "Maccann" spelling, and,
being a novice, I started using it as well. As I read more, however,
I noticed that most other people used the spelling "McCann".

Not too long ago I got email similar to yours from someone noted
for the depth and breadth of his knowledge about concertinas and
concertina history, who wondered how everyone could have got the wrong
spelling, and pointed out that he had found the "McCann" usage in lots
of concertina magazines, in some highly-reputable academic books, plus
on the websites of all the people who know the most about concertinas
(including both individuals and distinguished institutions), while the
spelling "MacCann" was very rare.

He is certainly right, and in particular the web is, as he says,
almost unanimous for the "McCann" spelling. But I can find this spelling
only from the 1960s or 1970s onward; the "concertina revival" documents in
Neil Wayne's archives are full of "McCann". And, right alongside, it
appears to me that people who were reading older documents (e.g., Goran
Rahm, or Bryan Hayden, or Chris Timson) have usually used the spelling
"MacCann".

One of the documents that I've been consulting is an article by
Kenneth V. Chidley, "The 'Duet' System, discussed by K. V. Chidley,"
in World Accordion Review incorporating "The Concertina", Vol 6, No 3
(December 1950), pp 31-32. The Chidley who wrote this (as we now know
from some very recent detective work by Wes Williams) was Kenneth
Vernon Chidley (1892-1964), the son of Edward Chidley junior
(1858-1941) and the grandson of Edward Chidley senior (1830-1899); K.
V. was at the time a director of Wheatstone & Co. and Technical
Advisor to the magazine. He refers to "J. H. MacCann, of Plymouth".
So the original spelling was alive and well, in Chidley's memory and
in this magazine at least, in 1950. (I found a copy of this at the
Horniman Museum Library.)

But I also have what seems to be essentially the same article
(possibly from a copy of the manuscript, minus a few words) reprinted
by Neil Wayne with additional notes (by Neil) as "The Duet
Concertina -- Its History and the Evolution of its Keyboard," in Free
Reed: The Concertina Newsletter, 17 (Jan/Feb 1974), pp 15-17. This
re-publication uses the spelling "McCann". So between 1950 and 1974,
the SAME article had moved from being printed with the correct
spelling to being printed with the incorrect one.

I have a copy of Peter Honri's "Working the Halls" (1973) on my
shelf, and in the index it says "MacCann, J. H. - concertinist 37f".
So Honri (or his publisher's reader) knew the spelling in 1973. (Chris
Timson has told me that it was Peter Honri's book that he relied upon
when he decided long ago to use "MacCann" in his Concertina FAQ, contrary
to all the other web spellings.)

Phil Inglis wrote a series in the Australian Concertina Magazine,
in its numbers 12, 13, and 14 (1985). He refers to "J. H. Maccann of
Plymouth" and talks about "the original Maccann system", so he knew
the spelling in 1985.

Brian Hayden's series of articles on "Fingering Systems for Duet
Concertina", again in Concertina Magazine, numbers 16-19 (1986-87),
talks about "the time that Maccann filed his Provisional Patent" and
the like. It would be no surprise that Hayden knew the right
spelling, since he'd collected all the patent documents in reviewing
prior art prior to patenting his own system.

Hayden's very interesting articles on playing chords (Concertina
Magazine, numbers 12-14, 1985), however, use both "McCann" and
"MacCann"--in the same physical magazines in which Inglis is
consistently writing "Maccann"! Perhaps this manuscript was
inconsistently corrected for publication--especially easy to do when
the author was in England and the publisher was in Australia.

One of the most striking cases has to do with Neil Wayne's
important article "The Wheatstone English Concertina," in The Galpin
Society Journal 44 (1991): 117-49--the article mentioned in the email
I quoted above. In the PAPER journal (which is not easy to find),
there is a paragraph reading:

"This 'Duette' system of Wheatstone's was resurrected and enlarged by
'Professor' MacCann of Plymouth in the 1880s: he designed and patented
an enlarged keyboard, and persuaded both the Wheatstone and Lachenal
companies to produce the instrument as the 'McCann Duet'. These were
made with up to eighty-one keys, and many examples can be seen in the
Wheatstone and Lachenal sections of the C[oncertina] M[useum]
Collection."

The same article is available online at Neil Wayne's website
(www.free-reed.co.uk), but in the ONLINE version the paragraph says:

"This 'Duette' system of Wheatstone's was resurrected and enlarged by
'Professor' McCann of Plymouth in the 1880s: he designed and patented
an enlarged keyboard, and persuaded both the Wheatstone and Lachenal
companies to produce the instrument as the 'McCann Duet'. These were
made with up to eighty-one keys, and many examples can be seen in the
Wheatstone and Lachenal sections of the C M Collection."

Those with acute vision will notice that in the PAPER Galpin
Society publication the name of the inventor (but not that of the
system) has been corrected to "MacCann". Based on some correspondence
about this article in the Wayne Archives at the Horniman, I believe it
is possible that the Galpin Society editor did fact-checking and corrected
Professor MacCann's name, but left the reference to the concertina
unchanged, possibly believing that it was a trade-name variant. (And
actually, I suspect, the rest of the sentence is incorrect as well:
Lachenal certainly called the instrument the MacCann Duet, as in the
tutor published by Lachenal; and I don't know that Wheatstone ever
used the MacCann or McCann name when they began production after the
patent exclusivity of Lachenal expired in 1898.)

You will soon have at least one more web and non-web reference using
"MacCann". I've co-authored an article with Neil Wayne and with
Margaret Birley, the Keeper of Musical Instruments at the Horniman,
about that unusual 12-sided 1938 Wheatstone with the 1861-vintage
fingering that we discovered on eBay in late 1999; the article is
entitled "A Wheatstone Twelve-Sided 'Edeophone' Concertina with
Pre-MacCann Chromatic Duet Fingering", and Allan Atlas has accepted it
to appear in the next number (vol 3, Fall 2001) of his Free-Reed
Journal from CUNY. So this is confirmation that Neil Wayne, the Horniman
Museum, and Allan Atlas are all in the "MacCann" camp, which is a
pretty good recommendation.

For what it's worth, I think it is reasonable to use "Maccann" when
referring to the Professor himself, since he invariably spelled his
own name that way (as far as I know), and to use "MacCann" as a sort
of normalized orthography for the name of the fingering system. This
also minimizes the apparent weirdness, since "McCann" and "MacCann"
are read by most people as being very similar--which is probably the
cause of our problem in the first place.